This is one from an extended series of "body prints" Hammons made by pressing his skin and clothing, smeared with grease or margarine, against a board or a sheet of paper and then sprinkling the surface with graphite or pigment. A haunting image of the artist draped in the American flag, his hands joined in prayer, it was created just a year after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and during a time of nationwide protests, race riots, and demonstrations against the Vietnam War. It speaks broadly to what Hammons described as his "moral obligation as a Black artist to try to graphically document what I feel socially."

Gallery label from

From the Collection: 1960-69, March 26, 2016 - March 12, 2017.

Medium Screenprint and pigment on paper
Dimensions 60 1/2 × 30" (153.7 × 76.2 cm)
Credit Gift to The Museum of Modern Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem by the Hudgins Family in honor of David Rockefeller on his 100th birthday
Object number 524.2015
Department Drawings and Prints

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David Hammons

David Hammons

American, born 1943 21 works online

David Hammons once commented that “outrageously magical things happen when you mess around with a symbol." For the past 50 years, Hammons has created a vocabulary of symbols from everyday life and messed around with them in the form of prints, drawings, performances, video, found-object sculptures, and paintings.

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